, a political science professor at Snead State Community college in Boaz, Alabama, said that his students often believed that the term originated because of the large African-American population currently living in that region.

While Kitchens' students are technically wrong, the term has since evolved to take on politically charged meaning, deeply rooted in the civil rights era and the African-American people that have continuously resided in the region since the early 1800s.

"The older meaning of term, dating back to 1820s and 30s, was really about the rich dark soil where people planted cotton and built plantations on, and of course, with that came African-American slavery," said Allen Tullos, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, and author of Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie. "So pretty early on those meanings got combined."

As a consequence of the racial make up the region, which contained more than 50 percent of all slaves in the nation, the term outgrew its early farming roots and expanded with slavery throughout the south. As early as 1901, the year Alabama's Constitution was written, the term had already taken on a deeper meaning, as explained by one of the most prominent African-Americans of the time, Booker T. Washington: "Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense -- that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white."

American sociologist Arthur Raper further described the region as around 200 plantation counties "in which over half the population is Negro" lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas."

Over time, poor farming techniques saw the soil erode down to the limestone base, known as the Selma Chalk, according to Tallos' article on the Black Belt. By the middle of the 20th century, the rich black soil was gone, leaving behind large swathes of poor farmland occupied by descendants of the slaves that once was farmed the land. The original meaning of Black Belt had been lost.

It was then when things in the south began to rapidly change.

"The boll weevil invasion, the collapse of cotton tenancy, the failure to diversify economically, the urban exodus, and the repressive era of Jim Crow all combined to mire the southern Black Belt in a seemingly irreversible decline," wrote Tallos. "What had been one of America's richest and most politically powerful regions became one of its poorest."

Those that remained in the south witnessed how the term fully evolved from a geographical descriptor to one that was used prominently to encapsulate a lot what was being experienced by African-Americans during the Civil Rights era. More recently, it describes a region in economic decline.

"The Alabama Black Belt as a region of insurgent African American aspirations makes a strong claim to take over the meaning of the term from its older and other senses," said Tallos. "The electoral transformation here, however, remains thwarted in efforts to tap the economic resources of this region which generates wealth for a small number of individual landowners."

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